Good and Bad America – an idea ripped off from this site!

Being an immigrant gives you a wonderful opportunity to observe what is different about your new country. While life here is more ‘normal’ to me than my time in Japan, it is a different culture with it’s own sensibilities and traditions. Things are different here and I am hoping to write about them as I come across them.

The first three – hot stuff!

For my first foray into good and bad I decided to focus on good.

1. Starbucks everywhere!

I really love coffee shops. There is nothing like sitting in a comfortable coffee shop reading or using their internet. In Japan I virtually had my lunch in Tully’s everyday, during my year at Uni in 2009/10 I did the bulk of my reading at Starbucks. Point is I really dig coffee shops and I love that they are everywhere here, not only everywhere but (where I live) easily accessible, no longer am I forced to drive into the middle of town and left endlessly circling looking for a parking place. Once I have a job and a car I am definitely going to be visiting the coffee shop more often.

2. Spicy actually means SPICY!

I like spicy food. Those who know me know that poor Beth is forever having her mouth blown off when I cook. Many times I’ve heard ‘My mouth has gone numb!’. Vindaloo (and occasionally phaal) was my curry of choice back home. You can see I really like spicy. In Scotland, I would always buy spicy foods or snacks and be disappointed at how bland they were. It was extremely rare that I found something that satisfied my incendiary pallette.

Not so in the US. Spicy means spicy. Excellent!

3. The cloud actually works!

Since moving to the US I have been enjoying being able to utilise services like Google Music. It’s great to be sitting anywhere that I have an internet connection and be able to access my music collection. This will be really useful when I have a slightly better phone. It’s nice to see these cloud storage services start to roll out in the UK.